Lone voices special: How we know what we know

Science has always struggled to sift crackpot ideas from genuine maverick genius. If it were just a matter of combining unambiguous data with flawless theories, the task would be quite simple. Unfortunately, says Harry Collins, science is an all-too-human activity, and heroes and villains come in every possible guise.

I was at a closed conference with friends and acquaintances from the gravitational wave world, a group I have studied and written about for 30 years. The dress code was informal – T-shirts and jeans, or open-necked shirts and sports jackets for the older scientists. There at the podium was a medical doctor with a halo of white hair, in a smart grey suit and red bow tie, spouting management-speak. As far as we could tell, he seemed to be telling the group that it did not understand its &dollar;250 million interferometers, and that his microscale experiments showed they had missed something vital about the interaction of the mirrors. I swapped smirks with those around me. But we were wrong. A couple of stubborn scientists extracted the important bit of sense from the packaging, and the design was changed.

If science were a matter of combining unambiguous data from perfectly conducted experiments with flawless theories, assessing the claims of “outsider” scientists and their maverick ideas would not be that hard. But the logic of science is not so far removed from the logic of ordinary life (though admittedly ordinary life lived among extraordinary ideas and amazing machines) and so fallible human judgement still determines what happens at the heart of even the hardest science.

Since the 1960s, the tension between the canonical ...

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